Eclipse MicroProfile 1.1 release: Better JDK 8 compatibility

Eclipse MicroProfile is a year old! The road from 1.0 to 1.1 has been a tough one, but there’s a bunch of interesting new developments in in the MicroProfile world. Let’s take a look!

We already celebrated Eclipse MicroProfile’s birthday earlier this year with a closer look at everything that’s going on with this exciting microservices provider. It’s a brand new world for microservices and the MicroProfile venture is aimed at standardizing the various open source responses.

The developer community has been using the various Java EEs for microservices architecture for some time now. MicroProfile is just trying to make sure there’s a common thread tying everything together for collaboration. No one wants fragmentation! As long as there’s a baseline platform, devs will be able to have more options for portability and flexibility.

Eclipse MicroProfile 1.1

Okay, so what’s new? Basically, there’s one big change for release 1.1: the Config API. The Config API was designed so that when configuration data outside the application is modifies, the application itself doesn’t have to be modified. Basically, if an application needs different settings for different enviornments, the Config API allows these changed settings to be changed without restarting the whole operation.

This kind of thing is fairly important for a cloud-based micro services architecture. MicroProfile’s Config approach allows it to pick up configured values immediately after they have been changed.

No more JDK 7

This is less of a shock. JDK 7 is pretty old, you guys. If you’re still running it, you should probably upgrade to JDK 8. So, because MicroProfile is a forward-focused kind of project, they’ve decided that they’re no longer going to support JDK 7 anymore.

Previously, Eclipse MicroProfile hadn’t released anything that wasn’t compatible with JDK 7, so it wasn’t as much of a big deal. However, Config API does require JDK 8 to run properly. So, time to get with the program and upgrade, my friends.